If Crows Know Best (Mage of Merced Book 1) (4 page)

CHAPTER 4

I worked around the regular chores to find time to carry my packets up to the caves. Of an evening, after Morie and Annora went up to bed, I crept around the house gathering lamp oil and dried meat and fruit and all such like items. Annora sometimes stood and puzzled at a shelf which had become less laden from my dark-of-night raiding, but she did not ask any questions.

She sewed smocks and leggings for Morie, and taught her to whipstitch the edges of a felted vest. I came in one evening to find her working on a soft leather vest for me. Generally, I got Wils’s old clothing—cut down if I looked to trip over it or snag it on fenceposts. I’m not sure I ever had anything made for me before, being the second son. I wondered at it, soft and supple, made with two wool-lined pockets for hand warming.

“How did you learn to make such a thing?” I asked her. I could have been more polite, but she smiled wide for she could see I liked it well.

“It was easy to work up, such soft leather. Is it goatskin? I’ve used deerskin before. My gran taught me simple leatherwork. I can even make boots, just light ones, not like soldiers’ boots. Good for walking in the woods.”

Which she surmised my absences to be? “That would be useful. Is there leather enough?”

Annora nodded, firelight glinting on her hair, and bent to her work. Morie teased Murr with a bit of yarn, and scolded when he went for the finger that twitched it instead of the end of the tuft. He rolled on his back with claws up-stretched, purring so loud I could hear him over the pop and crackle of the fire.

###

Da taught me how to read by the fire of an evening, my eyes following as he moved his long, strong finger along a line of letters until I could make sound and sense out of the words. We owned any number of books. I loved them all, and balanced favorite ones on my lap to read aloud to Da when I had learned enough to be fluent. Morie had been read to, but was not yet learning to read herself when Da and Wils left us. Annora used paper and ink to make little books for her, and drew the pictures of the animals and flower sprites she wrote about. Morie was enchanted, as if she hadn’t already thought the sun rose for nobody but Annora.

Morie read her books to Murr and Wieser, and she tried to read them to me. One story told about rabbits dancing in the moonlight. Morie assured me Annora had made the meadow rabbits dance, on a night with an early moonrise. And perhaps Annora could make rabbits dance. She proved able to milk Noda, our ill-tempered nanny, without the useless thing stepping in a full bucket or sneaking in a kick. Which I had never been able to do in all my years of chores.

Annora made a doll for Morie—a poppet stuffed with lamb’s wool and dressed in a miniature smock like Morie’s own. It seemed to be bound to Morie with invisible twine, and collected eggs with her every morning.

“What’s her name, then?” I asked wearily, sitting down to a supper of lentils and bread. Up and down the trail every day was wearing on me.

“Her name is Iggle. She likes her name,” crooned Morie. “Judian, when are Da and Wils coming home? Iggle is missing them.”

“Yeah, I can tell. What if I tell her as soon as somebody tells me.” I stared into my bowl for a bit. “I miss them, too.”

“Oh, me too,” breathed Annora. But still she didn’t cry. Nor did she look up from the needlework in her hands.

###

As the weather grew colder, folk began to bring animals up to Annora on the mountain, since she did not dwell at the village edge any longer. I often brought Dink to the barn on my return from the high country and found somebody’s milk cow with a caked udder being tended by Annora in a lantern’s glow, or an injured hawk with a bandaged wing. She used some of the garden herbs I hadn’t known the proper use of to concoct her broths and tisanes. Many plants hung in the kitchen rafters, drying in bunches for the first time since my mum had gathered them.

It was one such cool evening when the smith’s wife came to our door. Annora and I trooped out to her little cart, where her son of about eight years old sat holding the reins and looking sullen.

“I don’t know what to do,” said the wife, loosening her shawl from about her head and shoulders. “Bar’s gone off with the men folk to war, and it’s just me and the little ones trying to keep things going at the forge. Ticker here took it in his head to go hunting and you see what’s come of it. We can’t have any more bad luck!” She drew a square of canvas away from the cart bed, uncovering a dead vixen with swollen teats, an arrow wound in her chest. Ticker hung his head lower still.

“You’ve found her litter, though?” Annora pointed at a basket I hadn’t noted, tucked up under the cart seat. This brought a little spark to Ticker, who hurried to take the basket up and proffer it to Annora as he climbed to the ground.

“I had to look for the den a long time. I looked and looked before I found it. I didn’t mean to kill a mother fox. I shot her before I realized. I wouldn’t have taken her if I had known!” He shot a look at his glowering mother.

“It is strange,” Annora said kindly as she knelt in front of the boy. “The vixen was ill-favored, bearing so far out of her season. This should be a spring litter. You wouldn’t expect to find her with young kits now.” She lifted the woven lid and looked at the tangle of small fuzzy bodies.

“Can you take them to foster?” asked the wife. “We can’t afford the bad luck, killing a mother. You know how that follows a person. Idiot child!”

Annora likely would have taken the kits in any case, but faced with the distress of both the hunter and his mother, I stepped forward and took the basket.

“We’ll see to them as best we can,” I said. “They’re very young,” I added doubtfully. The basket was hardly heavier than if packed with feathers.

“I’ll find a wet-nurse for them,” Annora confirmed. And in fact, I expect the mother and son had not traveled back to the village forge, by the time Annora had the kits tucked up with Wieser in the barn, in a wooden box lined with fresh straw.

“She hasn’t any milk,” I pointed out.

“She will by morning,” replied Annora, holding a bowl of some kind of milky-colored herb sap for Wieser to drink.

“Will she be tied to home, then?” I had gotten used to her company.

“I’ll find a vixen, so they don’t grow up not knowing their proper ways. Here, we need to keep it dark for them now, like the den.” She took up the lantern as Wieser began to lick the nearest kit, which wriggled and squeaked. I counted six altogether, and sent up a prayer to the gods that the ill-luck of the smithy’s wife and son would not be visited on us instead. It
was
strange, the vixen bearing so late in the year.

When we returned to the front steps, we found the little vixen’s body, still in its pitiful square of canvas, laid on the bottom step.

“They do want it all to be far from their own door, don’t they?” Annora said, with the first touch of annoyance I had heard in her voice since she came to the mountain.

“I’ll bury her. The smell of blood will make the stock restless. I’ll go get the shovel and carry her over beyond the apple trees.”

“Do you want help?”

“No, no need.”

When I returned to stow the shovel, I saw Annora’s silhouette in the moonlight, standing at the edge of the larch grove with her arms outstretched. I could hear her humming softly but could not make out if she sang words.

Three days later, a sleek red vixen was curled up with the kits when I went into the barn for morning chores, and Wieser was sitting by Dink’s stall. I put my head out the door and called to Annora as she passed by with the full egg basket. “Is this the fox that was sitting out here the night of your wedding dinner?”

“That was a dog fox. Not much good for nursing kits. I called this one from farther away, though she’s been that one’s mate before,” she said as she walked on through the dewy grass.

“Yah, of course,” I muttered, taking up the pitchfork. “Probably brought her bloodstock certificate all written out. Chapel apostate probably signed the paperwork for the mating. Matter of record. You could look it up.” I kept grumbling while I worked, but the foster-mother did not stir from her charges, and Wieser waited patiently for me to get Dink ready for our journey to the caves.

###

Some three weeks later, on a drizzly, grey afternoon I saw the soldiers as I rounded the east ridge on my way down from the nearest cave. Not Da, but a big man wearing a bluegrey Mercedian officer’s tunic, mounted on a bay horse, followed by six soldiers on foot who wore green tunics. They would come to the house on the road they were on, and before I could get there and chivvy everyone up to the cave, too. Wieser walked with me as usual. “I wish I could talk to you like Annora,” I said to her. She gave me the look of exaggerated patience she saved just for me. “Run down to the house and warn them, then!”

She shot off instantly, out of sight down the path and back into the trees. I knew what Annora and Morie would be doing at home. Sitting in their small clothes drying their hair before the fire, because today was the day Annora laundered clothes and washed herself and Morie—she went through these ablutions every week without fail, and I had learned when to come home to avoid catching them at it.

I fairly flew down the path, for I had not brought the mule and wasn’t laden on the way down the mountain. Rain-slicked rocks sent me sprawling twice, scrambling and snatching my way back to my feet. Chest bursting, I careered into the back garden and swatted open the gate. Would they all be murdered? Should I find some sort of weapon? Blast all, why had Da and Wils gone off and left us up here like orphan cubs in a den?

Wieser came bounding around the corner of the house. She looked back over her shoulder, then looked pointedly at me. So I followed her around the stone corner, to find Annora standing on the porch with Morie peeking from behind her skirts. The big man stood in the yard holding his horse’s reins, with his men ranged behind him.

All eyes shifted to me. “Come, Wieser,” I said, still gasping a bit. I mounted the steps to stand by Annora, and felt Morie grasp the back of my trouser leg. Wieser stood beside me. Head lowered, she lifted her lips to bare white teeth and gave a low rumble.

“Yet more children!” the officer exclaimed. “How many does Fenn Lebannen have?”

“Get behind me,” Annora said softly.

“No,” I said back.

“I’ve come up here to speak to Paladin Lebannen. I thought he had sons, grown ones by now.” He scratched his forehead with a gloved hand and looked up at us. “We need to look to my mount and put my men up for tonight. Is your da expected by dark, then?”

I wasn’t going to answer that, and it seemed Annora had not made free with information, either. Why didn’t he know where Da was, if this soldier was on our side? “Who are you?” I asked.

He sketched the fist-to-heart salute of our military, with a corner of his mouth twisted up. “I am Fieldmaster Behring. These are my men, and I’ve been sent to speak with your father, boy. I served with him before.”

“You might meet him coming from the harbour town road,” I suggested, this being my first thought of getting them far away from in front of our house.

“We came up on the coast road and saw no one.” The men standing behind him were large to my eyes, too, though younger and not so hard-looking as the officer. He looked like a dark hawk, with a sharp nose and big yellow teeth. I saw their clothes looked as mud-flecked and spattered as my own, and the young foot soldiers sagged with fatigue. The fieldmaster’s bay hung its head in the drizzle.

The officer sighed and looked over our heads at the mountain. “We’ll stay here tonight. It won’t do to go down the trail in the dark. What’s your name, Donatta?” he said to Annora, as proper to address a maiden.

“I’m Donah Annora Lebannen,” she said, correcting him about her status. “These are my husband’s brother and sister, Judian and Morie.”

He inclined his head. “Judian. Take my horse in out of the chill, if you would. He needs fed and his feet seen to.”

“Don’t your men do that?”

“They’ll be getting ready to be fed themselves. Whatever Donah Lebannen can pull out of the larder for us.” His smile might have been meant to be friendly, but I would not be sent apart from Annora and Morie. Not when it was my job to protect them. Soldiers are always hungry, Da had said. And not just for food … they might be our troops but still, they were soldiers.